The present invention relates to data distribution. More specifically, the present invention relates to the centralized distribution of Internet content.
With the growth of the global internetwork of networks generally referred to as the Internet, the amount of information accessible to people has increased tremendously. Information on the Internet can be generally referred to as “content” and can be any type of information, such as sports scores, weather, television listings, movie listings, etc. With the immense amount of content on the Internet, the task of finding content of relevance or interest becomes harder and harder for users. The organization of different web sites containing specific information facilitates a user's search. For example, sports web sites can be accessed for sports information, weather web sites accessed for weather information, and entertainment web sites for TV listings. However, a user may need varying kinds of information that specialized web sites do not provide. Thus, a user may have to search for the desired information and/or visit many web sites to retrieve the varying content. This process can be tedious and time consuming. Additionally, a user may not even find the desired content.
One solution is for the user to bookmark the different content specific sites making it easier for the user to visit the sites to access the applicable content. However, this process is still tedious and time-consuming in that a user has to download many different web pages.
Content specific web sites have attempted to address the problem by cross-referencing information related to other subjects. For example, a skiing web site might cross-reference or include information about the weather at certain ski resorts. Thus, a user would be able to read about the ski resort and also get weather information at the ski resort. The extra step of logging onto a weather web site to obtain the weather at the resort would then be avoided.
Additionally, web site providers allow users to customize web pages. For example, a user can be provided with their own customized web page. Typically, a content provider will supply a list of possible content that a user can display on the user's web page. The user can then select the desired content to be displayed on the user's personalized web page. Thus, a user can now access one web page to receive a multitude of varying information. For example, a user can organize a web page to display certain sports scores for a team, the weather in various cities, and stock quotes of specific corporations.
In order to provide a user with different content, web site providers must retrieve or receive data from many different sources. For example, the ski resort web site has to retrieve or receive weather information. Additionally, providers that supply customized web pages must receive content from an enormous number of sources. For example, in order to provide the one user's web page in the above example, the provider has to retrieve or receive sports, weather, and stock quote information, which is most often retrieved from different sources.
The information is usually retrieved by subscribing to a service that provides streaming content to the provider. Accordingly, specific streams of content are subscribed to by specific servers that serve up the content specific web pages. For example, a sports server would subscribe to sports service providing a stream of sports scores. Additionally, a weather server would subscribe to a weather service providing streaming weather content. In order to cross-reference content on different web pages, the servers associated with the cross-referencing web pages must communicate to transfer the desired content. For example, if the sports web page incorporates weather content, the sports server would maintain a connection to the weather server to retrieve weather content. Additionally, the server associated with the ski resort page would maintain a connection with the weather server to obtain weather thus, a server serving the user's web page would have to maintain connections to the sports and weather servers. With the increased usage and dependence on the Internet and as more and more users maintain personalized web pages and web sites include varying content to make the site comprehensive, servers must maintain connections with an enormous number of other servers.
Maintaining the high number of connections weighs down the bandwidth of a provider's network. Accordingly, additional equipment, such as servers and routers, must be installed to allow the servers to communicate efficiently. Typically, a server maintains computing scripts that define how to retrieve and parse content. In order to maintain the scripts, computing power and personhours are consumed by having to maintain the scripts on every server. Further, a typical implementation requires a large number of scripts, and the large number of scripts use up an immense amount of processing space in memory and also increase the probability of errors while running the scripts.